Safety Standards & Procedures 

Safety is the overriding priority that governs current air traffic control operations and future activities.

AirNav Ireland strives at all times to ensure an open safety culture. The Air Traffic Management (ATM) Standards and Procedures department continually aims to improve operational safety and there are a number of processes in place to achieve this. For example, any changes to airspace configuration are subject to a safety case, before those changes are implemented. The safety case approach not only provides air traffic control operations with the evidence that proposed changes to the ATM system can be safely implemented but also demonstrates to the Safety Regulatory Authority that such changes have been subject to rigorous analysis processes which are fully documented and auditable.

All operational safety occurrences are required to be reported through a Mandatory Occurrence Reporting (MOR) Scheme. The MOR scheme is a non-punitive scheme, whereby staff are encouraged to report occurrences or potential occurrences. These reports are investigated locally and, if necessary, at a national level by AirNav Ireland staff who have been trained in Occurrence Investigation and Human Error in ATM (HERA) by Eurocontrol. The purpose of these investigations is to determine:

• What happened
• Why
• What can be done to prevent a recurrence

Through training, lesson dissemination, briefing sessions, refresher training and general safety awareness campaigns, AirNav Ireland aims to generate an awareness of the causes of safety occurrences to eliminate or reduce the probability of a recurrence.

A formal Safety Management System was introduced by AirNav Ireland in May 2003, which aims to achieve a systematic and explicit approach to managing safety by identifying hazards and eliminating or mitigating against such hazards. The Safety Management System is applied by AirNav Ireland managers to ensure, in a traceable manner, that the service provided in their area of responsibility is safe.

AirNav Ireland, at all times, aims to ensure that all operational equipment and procedures are safe and that all operational personnel are properly trained and competent to perform their duties.